This account of Ayer's philosophy is by
the strong and rightly confident philosopher, Lord Quinton, author of The Nature of
Things and The Politics
of Imperfection: The Religious and Secular Traditions of Conservative
Thought in England from Hooker to Oakeshott
, and, on top of that, Utilitarian
Ethics and more. President of Trinity
College in Oxford for a time, he earlier was a fellow in philosophy at
New
College. Ayer resided there as Wykeham Professor of Logic. In his
autobiography,
Ayer records that Lord Quinton supported him in the matter of his
election
to the Wykeham chair, and became his closest friend. He brings to the
writing of this obituary, for the Proceedings of
the British Academy, a proper commitment to something other
than past connection, and no great deference to the nostrum de mortuis nil
nis bonum.
His account is to be compared with another to which you can turn, A. J. Ayer's Philosophy and Its Greatness
, which is different.

--------------------

Sir Alfred Ayer, as A. J. or Freddie Ayer came to be known to some
extent after 1970, was born on 29 October 1910. His father was Jules
Ayer, a French-speaking Swiss from Neufchatel, who had lived in England
since coming here to join his mother at the age of seventeen. He worked
for some years in Rothschild's Bank and as secretary to Alfred
Rothschild, and died in 1928 at the time
when A. J. Ayer was preparing to move from Eton to Oxford. He had
married
in 1909 Reine Citroen, who was of an Ashkenazi Jewish family from
Holland.
Her uncle Andre set up the car firm which bears the family name, and
her
father, David, was also in the car business and established the Minerva
company.
He rescued Jules from bankruptcy in 1912 and set him up in the timber
business,
where he seems to have prospered mildly. The grandfather appears to
have
been a larger presence in A. J. Ayer's early life than Jules.

Ayer was born in the family flat in St John's Wood and lived the
solitary urban life of an only child of not very assimilated parents.
In 1917 he
was sent to a preparatory school at Eastbourne, which Ayer thought
resembled
the St Cyprians of George Orwell and Cyril Connolly, against which
matches
were played. He worked hard and was well taught, gaining the third
classical
scholarship to Eton in an examination he was sitting simply as a trial
run
for a later assault on Charterhouse. He recalls that he did not get on
well
with the other boys, attributing this in a clear-headed way to his
`unguarded
tongue and propensity for showing off'', characteristics which he
continued
to display, along with many more attractive ones, for the rest of his
life.
He also admits to boring his schoolfellows with his militant atheism,
another
lasting trait. All the same, he made some good friends and was
well-regarded
enough by his contemporaries to be elected to Pop, the Eton Society. He
greatly
disliked the Master in College, H. K. Marsden, but got on well with Dr
Alington,
the headmaster, Robert Birley and Richard Martineau. A very intense
degree
of specialisation in classics brought the reward of the top classical
scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford, to which he went in 1929.

Despite the almost exclusively classical emphasis of his first twelve
years of formal education, it left little direct imprint on him. At
Oxford he
did not take classical honour Mods. Instead of spending five terms on
classics he took pass Mods in one term, on a couple of books of
Tacitus' Annals and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. In
the massive range of his publications between 1933 and his death in
1989 there is nothing whatever about ancient philosophy or an ancient
philosopher, not even a book review. Plato and Aristotle do make a
token appearance together in Language, Truth and Logic but then
only in a parenthesis along with Kant, as part-time practitioners of
'philosophical analysis'. His mind seems to have been fully fixed and
matured by his early twenties. His initial and, to a large extent,
lasting preoccupation with the theory of knowledge never led him to
reflect seriously on Plato's Theaetetus or Protagoras.

Ayer's involvement in philosophy seems to have come about suddenly and
for no particular reason. It served no existing intellectual interest
but
appeared, rather, to fill a gap by providing some ideal material for
his
powerfully argumentative intelligence to work on. A master at Eton had
run
an informal class on the pre-Socratic philosophers. Before Ayer left
school
he had read Russell's Sceptical Essays (which contains very
little
philosophy proper) and had been led by a reverent mention of G. E.
Moore
in Clive Bell's Art to read Principia Ethica.

There was a certain narrowness to Ayer's mind which focused it sharply
and contributed to its force. His lack of interest in ancient
philosophy,
which has just been mentioned, was part of a general indifference to
the
history of the subject. In practice he treated it as a contemporary
phenomenon,
or, at any rate, as a twentieth-century one. Hume and Mill he took
seriously. The most ancient philosophers he wrote about at any length,
C. S. Peirce
and William James, died, respectively, in 1914 and 1910. There was no
sense
of temporal remoteness in his approach to any of them. For the most
part
the philosophers whose work commanded his attention were active when he
was:
Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, Ramsey, Price, Carnap, C. I. Lewis,
Quine,
Goodman. Opponents, to the marginal extent in which he took explicit
notice
of them, were also contemporary: Broad, Ewing, Austin.

His interests were restricted in space as well as in time, being mainly
confined to the English-speaking world and to the Vienna of the 1930s.
His more or less perfect mastery of French did not induce him to study
any French philosophers, apart from the special cases of Poincare and
Nicod, until an impulse of intellectual journalism prompted him at the
end of the war to write
articles on Sartre and Camus for Cyril Connolly's Horizon.

A further limitation, a little less conspicuous, was in the range of
philosophical fields or topics on which he worked. Theory of knowledge
was first and foremost, and, within it, the philosophy of perception in
particular, but also our
knowledge of the past and of other minds. Beside that he addressed
himself
at length to philosophical logic (the nature of necessity at first and
later
to reference, identity, truth, existence, negation, and the nature of
individuals),
the philosophy of mind (personal identity, the ownership of
experiences),
probability and induction, ethics (in a very generalised and schematic
fashion),
and the issue of the freedom of the will. He was not a practitioner of
formal logic or, to any marked extent, of the philosophy of science,
apart from
essays on laws of nature and the direction of causation.

He had very little to say about the more concrete or human parts of
philosophy: nothing on the philosophy of history, or of law, or of art,
or of education. His only contribution to political philosophy until
his very late book on Thomas Paine was a lecture on philosophy and
politics which he delivered
in 1965. Here he drew on memories of a course he had given in Oxford in
the
late 1930s, and set out a list of all the possible grounds of political
obligation he could think of and found all but the utilitarian one
wanting. He was
a philosopher of religion only in the sense that a dynamiter is an
architect.

These limitations are by no means peculiar to Ayer among philosophers
of this century. There are, indeed, more extreme cases, although G. E.
Moore is perhaps the only example of comparable eminence. Ayer is very
different in this respect from his hero and model, the gloriously
omnicompetent Bertrand Russell. Nevertheless, the fields he cultivated
were the most philosophically fertile of his epoch, in part, no doubt
because of his work in them, and
the philosophers to whom he gave his attention were those who
pre-eminently
deserved it.

The Oxford in which he began his study of philosophy at the start of
1930 was at a low ebb philosophically. Ryle wrote, 'During my time as
an undergraduate and during my first few years as a teacher. the
philosophical kettle in
Oxford was barely lukewarm. I think it would have been stone cold but
for
Prichard'. The other two professors besides Prichard were idealists: H.
H. Joachim, a gifted and stylish thinker who had given up direct
contribution
to the subject, and J. A. Smith, a capable Aristotelian scholar but
only
barely a philosopher. Prichard, together with the redoubtable H. W. B.
Joseph,
kept up the tradition of Cook Wilsonian realism, a form of intensely
critical
philoaophising from which, for the most part, only negative conclusions
cnmrged,
such as that knowledge and moral obligation are both indefinable and
irreducible
to anything else. On the whole there was no constructive work going on
in
philosophy, only the carefully critical examination of philosophy which
already
existed.

Two philosophers of a much more animated kind were, however, present
and beginning to make themselves felt: H. H. Price and Gilbert Ryle.
Both of
them had been enlivened by the influence of the altogether more
vigorous
philosophical world of Cambridge. Price, in bold defiance of
Prichardian
orthodoxy, spent a year there and returned a convert to the analytic
pluralism
of the early Russell and Moore and, in particular, to the theory that
sense-data
are the immediate ob,jects of perception. Ryle acquired from close
study
of Russell and the Tractatus the conviction that the logic of
our
thoughts is obscured by the grammar of the language in which we express
them.
At the time he was teaching Ayer he published his celebrated account of
philosophy
as 'the detection of the sources in linguistic idioms of
misconstructions
and absurd theories.'

From his close and regular contacts with Ryle, Ayer acquired a great
deal. In doctrinal terms he picked up a resolute commitment to the
identification of the senseless, of unmeaning, idle talk. He was
encouraged to indulge
the bent he shared with Ryle for the bold and uncompromising dismissal
of
positions with which he disagreed. Even more important, perhaps, was
Ryle's
introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus and his suggestion
that
on finishing his degree, Ayer should go, not to Cambridge as he had
planned,
but to Vienna to study at first hand the activities of the Vienna
Circle.
From Price, more remotely and largely through the medium of the
lectures
which presented the contents of Price's Perception (published
in 1932),
Ayer acquired his devout and persisting adherence to empiricism. Ayer's
empiricism
was a much more constricted one than Price's. Its emblem is the entry
for
'experience' in Language, Truth and Logic, which reads 'see
sense-experience'. The experience, which for Ayer is both the criterion
of significance and the
foundation of knowledge, does not extend to embrace moral or aesthetic,
religious
or mystical experience. Ayer would not have denied that there are
states
of mind which are properly so called; only that they have any cognitive
import.
He has so little to say about sensation's traditional partner --
'reflection',
introspection, self-consciousness -- that a good case could be made for
the
view that he did not countenance it at all. In Language, Truth and
Logic it is nowhere mentioned as such. Minds or selves are said to
be 'reducible
to sense-experiences' which hardly accommodates the thoughts, desires
and
emotions he casually attributes to them.

While still an undergraduate, Ayer read a paper to a society on the
Tractatus, which he believed to have been the first public
treatment
of Wittgenstein in Oxford. This up-to-date enthusiasm nearly deprived
him
of his first in Lit. Hum. in 1932. The philosophy examiners marked him
down
with partisan disapproval. H. T. Wade-Gery, an ancient history
examiner,
seeing what was going on, marked him up. The narrow squeak did not
worry
his college, which had already appointed him to a special lectureship
since
they extended it for a third year and then, when that ended, to a
research
studentship on the strength of favourable opinions from Whitehead,
Moore,
and Price. Whitehead's was based on specimen chapters of Language,
Truth
and Logic, which was not yet published. Since he was not needed for
teaching
in 1932, he set off for Vienna with Renee Lees, whom he had just
married.

He was generously welcomed by Schlick and the Vienna Circle, and sat in
on their discussions. Back in Oxford in the summer of 1933 he gave a
course of lectures on Wittgenstein and Carnap and settled down to the
composition of Language, Truth and Logic, which was completed
in 1935 and published by Gollancz in an attractive form the following
year. In the years that remained before the war he did some teaching at
Christ Church, regularly attended
and contributed to the joint sessions of the Mind Association and
Aristotelian Society each summer, took part in the foundation of
Analysis, a platform
for logical positivism in Britain, failed to secure permanent positions
at
his own college where he was edged out by Frank Pakenham (Lord
Longford),
and at Pembroke (where Collingwood's promotion to the chair of
metaphysics
had created a vacancy), met Carnap and Popper, and served as chairman
of
the microscopic Soho labour party. Early in 1940 he was called up in
the
Welsh Guards, so that The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge,
on which
he had been working since the completion of Language, Truth and Logic,
could
have its preface addressed from 'Brigade of Guards Depot, Caterham,
Surrey'
when it was published in April 1940.

The main contentions of Language, Truth and Logic are at once
too well-known and too lucidly and forcefully set out in the book
itself to need very elaborate exposition here. Metaphysics, conceived
as a theory of a transcendental nature about what lies behind
sense-experience is 'eliminated' by the application of the verification
principle or, more precisely, by a very weak form of
it which requires for the significance of a statement only that
possible
observations should be relevant to the determination of its truth or
falsehood.
Philosophy is an analytic undertaking, supplying definitions, not
information
about transcendent reality. Much of past philosophy is in fact analytic
in
character. The a priori propositions of logic and mathematics are
necessarily
true (or false) because of the linguistic conventions governing the
terms
which occur in them and are devoid of substantive content. Material
objects
are logical constructions out of sense-experience, as are selves or
persons,
but that does not imply that they are any less real than their
elements.
The elements themselves are neither mental nor physical. Propositions
about
the elements, that is to say reports of immediate experience, are not
incorrigible
since predication or classification of the given involves implicit
comparison
with what is not given. Probability is the degree of confidence it is
rational to place in a belief, and rationality is defined in terms of
procedures
which have been found to be reliable. Truth, following Ramsey, is a
logically
superlluous signal of affirmation. Moral and religious utterances are
both
without literal significance, but for somewhat different reasons:
religious
ones because they are about the transcendent, moral ones because it is
a
fallacy to interpret them naturalistically and metaphysical to
interpret
them as referring to a transcendent realm of values. A brisk concluding
chapter
comes down on the side of empiricism against rationalism, of realism
against
idealism, and of pluralism against monism. In what is even by Ayer's
standards
an amazing feat of concision, the free will problem is solved in a few
lines
of a footnote.

The first thing to notice about the book is something that will ensure
its place in the philosophical canon, at the expense of manv more
judicious
and many more original books: its remarkable litcrarv merit. In its
60,000
words it covers a very broad range of philosophical problems, indeed
pretty
well the whole philosophical table d'h6te of its epoch, with
considerable
penetration, even if some carelessness, in superbly lucid prose, whose
slightly
glacial impersonality is mitigated by the book's bold and combative
enthusiasm.
In the sixty years since it was published, no philosophical book has
combined its style, economy, and capacity to excite. It ranks for these
qualities
somewhere near Descartes' Meditations and Berkeley's Principles,
and very close to Russell's Problems of'Philosophy.
What
does differentiate these books from Ayer's is that they are original
creations,
where his is almost wholly derivative.

His 'elimination of metaphysics" is taken very largely from an essay by
Carnap, with that phrase, in German, as its title. The identification
of genuine
philosophy with analysis was prefigured in the last chapter of
Russell's Our Knowledge of the External World and was
propounded in a strong, explicit form in various early writings of
Carnap. The view that a
priori propositions are analytic had, of course, been intimated by Hume
and
Leibniz, but had been unequivocally formulated in the Tractatus and, in
u
more straightforward fashion, by Schlick and Carnap in articles of 1930
and
1931. The idea that material things and persons are logical
constructions out of elements which are neither material nor mental was
adumbrated in Russell's Our Knowledge of the External World and
Analysis of Mind , and elaborated in detail in Carnap's Der
Logische Aufbau der Welt . Ayer's account of truth is a direct
transcription from Ramsey. His provocative observation that since the
statements that 'God exists' and 'God does not exist' are unverifiable
both theism and atheism are meaningless is, a little surprisingly,
credited to H. H. Price, who may well have thought it a reductio ad
ob.surdum of Ayer's position. Ayer says of his emotive theory of
ethics, 'I had in fact forgotten that a similar theory had been
advanced as early as 1923 by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards'. That
seems unlikely in view of the close verbal similarity between his 'we
may define the meaning of the various ethical words in terms both of
the different feelings they are ordinarily taken to express, and also
the different responses they are calculated to provoke' and their
"'(this) is good" serves only as an emotive sign expressing our
attitude to this and perhaps evoking similar attitudes in other
persons, or inciting them to action o1 one kind or another'. Of the
book's main theses only its suggestive but sketchy remarks about
probability, rationaliity and induction and the view that no empirical
belief is incorrigibly certain are clearly his own inventions.

Neither of them survived intact for long. The incorrigibility of
reports of immediate experience was admitted in Foundations of
Empirical Knowledge in 1940, and reinforced in the preface to the
second edition of Language, Truth and Logic in 1946, and in an
essay of 1950: 'Basic Propositions' (in Philosophical Essays).
When he came back to probability -- in two
short pieces of 1957 and 1961 and at greater length in Probabilitv
and
Evidence in 1972 -- it was trom a wholly new direction, starting
from
a critique of the logical relation and frequency theories neither of
which
was mentioned in the earlier treatment.

Language, Truth and Logic received a great deal of
attention as soon as it was published, much of it fairly hostile.
Intellectual, or strictly
philosophical, criticism was most effectively brought to bear on Ayer's
verificationism.
His version of it, weakened, in the light of Viennese experience, to
accommodate
scientific laws, turned out to accommodate anything. Restated in a
complicated,
recursive form in the second edition, it was shown by Alonzo Church
still
to be deficient. A more general objection was that it seemed to condemn
itself
to insignificance, since it is neither empirically confirmable nor
analytic.
Ayer's reply that it is analytic, a conventional proposal to define
'meaning'
in a particular way, allowed those hostile to its implications m
propose
another convention, compatible with their preferences, as hc rather
exhaustedly
acknowledged. He did not come back to the suhjcm until giving a brief
and
inconclusive survey of the controversy in 1971 in Central Questions
of Philosophy. The theory that a priori and neccessary truths are
analytic
was less damagingly criticised by defenders of synthetic necessary
truth.
In his second edition preface, Ayer effectively refuted the charge that
his
doctrine turned the necessary truths of logic and mathematics into
empirical
statements about the use of language. Before long, Quine's 'Two Dogmas
of
Empiriciam' in 1951 argued powerfully and influentially that there was
no
clear distinction between analytic and synthetic truths. Ayer did not
return
to the topic, apart from a slightly dispirited section on it in Central
Questions of Philosophy.

Other controversial positions taken up in Language, Truth and Logic
were abandoned or qualified in the second edition of the book in 1946,
in a substantial preface. His original view about our knowledge of
ourselves and of the minds of others was asymmetrical, along the lines
of Carnap's distinction
between the 'autological' and the 'heterological' in his Aufbau. 'I
am in pain' incorrigibly reports an introspection; .you are in pain'
is a more. or less conjectural hypothesis about your actual and
potential
behaviour. It follows that 'I am in pain' said by me is compatible with
'you
are not in pain' said by someone else at the same time about me, which
is
clearly absurd. The argument from analogy, which distinguishes an
experience
from the behaviour that manifests it, is tentatively reinstated.
Drawing
on Ryle's article 'Unverifiability-by-Me', Ayer argues that since it is
only
a contingent fact that an experience is part of the collection making
up
a particular person, it is not logically impossible that I should have
had
an experience which is in fact that of someone else. That was an idea
he
was to develop further.

His original conception of personal identity tied it conceptually to
the identity of a person's body. A person is the totality of momentary
complexes of experiences in each of which an organic sense-datum of a
particular human body is an element. This seems gratuitous and
implausible. Must I always
have organic sensations when I am conscious, when, for example, I am
preoccupied with a demanding intellectual problem'? Although he
continued to have a
predilection for a bodily criterion of personal identity, he did not
express
it in its original form.

Another oddity that was bundled out of sight by the use of Ryle's
suggestion was Ayer's initial adoption of C. I. Lewis's quaint theory
concerning the meaning of statements about the past. The Lewis view,
which Ayer took over, was that such statements are, despite
appearances, really about the present and future experiences of our own
which would, or could, empirically confirm them, such as future
glimpses of documents. But, he came to think, it is
only a contingent fact that I live when I do and not at some previous
time.
I could have witnessed the execution of Charles I and it is only a
matter
of fact that I did not.

Some of the shock effect of Ayer's version of the emotive theory of
ethics was reduced by his amendment that moral judgements express
attitudes, directed onto classes of actions, rather than immediate
emotional reactions to individual actions. That made room for a measure
of rational discussion in cases of
conflicts of value. Is the approved or condemned action really of the
favoured
or unfavoured class? But, he held, disagreements about value, to the
extent
that they are rational, are always factual. Ultimate conflicts about
values
are not rationally resolvable.

A final watering down of the original audacity of Language, Truth
and Logic concerned its reductivism, its conception of
philoaophical analysis as supplying logically equivalent translations
of problematic statements into
reports of immediate experience. He realised that this was a Utopian
ideal.
Material object statements are too 'vague' for the fit between them and
any
finite collection of sense-datum statements to be anything but loose.
All
the same, material objects statements have no content that cannot in
principle
be expressed in terms of sense-data.

Ayer's pre-war work in philosophy was completed in 1940 with Foundations
of Empirical Knowledge, just as he was called up. and published six
months later. It is mainly concerned with deveioping the fairly sketchy
exposition of his phenomenalism in ten pages of Language, Truth and
Logic
. For the next five years he was to publish practically nothing, only
an
admirably lucid and unhackneyed essay on the concept of freedom in
Cyril
Connolly's Horizon. In the hook's preface he very properly
acknowledges his debt to H. H. Price's Perception. Rightly
seeing that Price's book
was the most judicious, thorough, and illuminating discussion of the
problem
of our knowledge of the external world then available, he dissented
from
it on an issue of method and one large point of substance. Ayer took
philosophical
propositions to be linguistic conventions or proposals, not statements
of
fact, and he rejected Price's idea that a material thing consists. Over
and
above a 'family' of sense-data, actual and possible, of a 'physical
occupant'
as well, a ghostly residue of old-fashioned substratum. introduced to
carry
out the causal responsibilities of an unobserved material thing, all of
whose
component sense-data would be non-actual. Three of the book's five
chapters
are about the perception of material things. One concerns the
'egocentric
predicament', and another is on the subject of a number of problems
about
causation, only loosely related to the book's main topic.

The first chapter meticulously sets out the case for thinking that all
that we directly perceive is sense-data, based on the facts of illusion
and hallucination. It ends with the startling conclusion that the
sense-datum
theory is simply an alternative language which it is helpful to employ
for
epistemological purposes. It is, no doubt, a conceivable alternative to
the language of appearing. Macbeth could report his question-provoking
situation
in the words 'there appears to be a dagger in front of me', rather than
the words 'I am experiencing a dagger-shaped sense-datum'. (He would be
more likely to secure understanding if he did.) Ayer's view that we
could
call the objects of direct perception 'material things' if we made
certain
adjustments to our everyday assumptions would, if put into effect, have
the ludicrous consequence that material things were private to
particular
observers, existed only momentarily (or, at most, discontinuously) and
were
of only one sensory kind (visual, tactual or whatever). Courteously
criticised
by Price (and, much later, less courteously by J. L. Austin), this idea
soon
vanished without trace.

This, however, was not essential to Ayer's main project, a
phenomenalistic account of the 'construction' of material things out of
sense-data, that
is, of things that are public, continuous, and of several sensory
dimensions
out of things that are not.

The second chapter is devoted to giving a detailed account of the
nature of sense-data. Since they are by definition that about which we
are immediately certain in perception, they cannot appear to have
characteristics which
they do not have, or have characteristics which they do not appear to
have.
Their essential function is to be the infallibly known basis of all
empirical
knowledge. The assumption that empirical knowledge needs such a basis
is
never considered. In the final chapter on phenomenalism a loose,
non-translational
version of the theory is outlined. Material things are constructible
out
of collec-tions of sense-data that resemble each other, occur in
similar
contexts, are systematically reproducible, and vary in accordance with
the
movements of the perceiver.

The discussion of the 'egocentric predicament' anticipates the
treatment of propositions about other people's experience and of the
past in the second edition of Language, Truth and Logic. The
idea that the necessary privacy of experience is a matter of linguistic
convention which has alternatives is set out more plausibly than the
parallel contention about the publicity and continuity of material
things. The somewhat miscellaneous chapter about causality effectively
criticises G. F. Stout's 'animistic' and H. W. B.
Joseph's 'rationalistic' accounts of causation. The law of universal
causation
is defended against arguments from miracles, free will, and quantum
mechanics,
rather by sleight of hand in the third case. But Ayer holds that the
law
is not necessarily true; it is, rather, a 'heuristic maxim'.

The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge has most of the
merits of its predecessor. If it is, perhaps inevitably, less exciting,
it is much less sweeping and tnuch more argumentatively scrupulous.
That is not to say it was not open to the serious criticism which it
received in due course as
the main target of Austin's Sense and Sensibilia (1962). Ayer's
somewhat
indignant reply---'Has Austin Refuted the Sense-Datum Theory?'-- is
surprisingly
effective in showing most of Austin's objections to be captious.

Ayer had a thoroughly enjoyable war, nearly all of it, not bv his
contrivance, well out of harm's way. He joined the Welsh Guards in
March 1940 and was
commissioned in September of that year. He was soon redeployed to
intelligence
work, which seems a sensible decision by the authorities, and found
himself
interrogating German prisoners in London, using the linguistic skill
acquired
for the purpose of learning from the Vienna Circle. He went to New York
on
behalf of SOE and made visits to Accra, Algiers, Italy. and the south
of
France. The chapter devoted to this part of his war service in Part
of
My Life, the first. and better, of his two autobiographical
volumes,
is aptly called 'More Cloak than Dagger'.

Early in the war, he and his first wife separated, although they
remained quite close to one another. By then they had had two children.
The separation enabled him to engage in what at one paint hc calls 'an
active social life' and elsewhere, more bleakly, 'nineteen years of
casual affairs'.

At the end of the war, after early demobilisation, he took up the
fellowship to which he had been elected at Wadharn. This was not to
last for long.
He was invited to apply for the Grote chair at University College
London
and did so, not because he was attracted to that college or its
philosophy
department, but because he liked the idea of living in London. London
was
not to disappoint him, which was just as well since his department was
in
a seriously debilitated state. It was accommodated in what he described
in conversation as 'a couple of broom closets'. It had had no professor
since 1944, when the eloquent John Macmurray had left, after sixteen
years,
to go to Edinburgh. There was a reader, a scholarly francophile, who
used
the return of peace as an opportunity for constant visits to the
country
he loved, and a Greek lady, with no discoverable academic
qualifications,
who had been Macmurray's secretary and had somehow mutated into an
assistant
lecturer. There were some half-dozen undergraduates and no graduate
students.

Ayer responded energetically and successfully to the challenge. Within
a few years his department had become one of the liveliest in the
country.
He brought Stuart Hampshire on to the staff and, later, Richard
Wollheim.
The department was soon strong enough to supply itself with excellently
qualified lecturers of its own production: J. F. Thomson, John Watling,
P. B. Downing, and the somewhat mysterious A. H. Basson (later known,
after a visit to
the Sudan, as Anthony Pike Cavendish). The department developed an
intense
esprit de corps and this expressed itself at meetings addressed by
visiting
philosophers who were subjected, particularly if they came from Oxford,
to fierce argumentative assault. His colleagues largely confined
themselves
to Ayer's topics, which, if not all that numerous, were central and
important,
and wrote in versions of his spare, expeditious, rather impersonal
style.
There was no servility about this however; he was exposed to his own
sort
of criticism. The atmosphere of the department in Ayer's thirteen years
there is well caught in a novel by Veronica Hull (a pseudonym): The
Monkey
Puzzle. Ayer's fiddlings with his cigarettes and his watch-chain as
he
argued away on his feet are memorably recorded.

The social scene to which he had access in London was interesting and
varied. The most eminent and admired constituent of it was Bertrand
Russell, with whom Ayer began a long friendship at this time. That was
counterbalanced
by excommunication on the part of Wittgenstein, who had previously
seemed
quite favourably disposed. He was able to spend a good deal of time
with
scientists, which gratified him as a proclaimed defender of science.
Ayer
now began a protracted career of what may be called academic travel. He
became
an inveterate conference member and a frequent visiting professor in
the
United States, beginning with a stay at New York University in 1948.
Always
ready and vigorous in discussion, it is understandable that he should
expend
a good deal of time and energy doing something he did very well,
however
meagre its lasting value.

He began to make himself known to a wider public when his ideas,
particularly on morality and religion, were attacked publicly. C. E. M.
Joad in the New Statesman brought against him the traditional
Socratic charge of corrupting the young, contending that the emotive
theory of ethics led to Fascism. Time magazine joined in the hunt,
interviewing him in a malevolent fashion when he was in New York.
Narrowly considered, the charge is unwarranted. Philosophers have
combined adherence to the emotive theory not only with Christian
belief, but also with virtuous Christian practice, without evident
inconsistency.
Ayer himself had moral failings -- most obviously vanity and sexual
licence
-- but he was also generous, honest, and public-spirited, a practising
utilitarian,
as was only fitting in a professor at UCL. But emotivism, in his
version,
at any rate, rather than more decorous one does tend to suggest that
morality
is, in the end, a matter of arbitrary whim.

One public-spirited activity to which he gave a good deal of himself
was the editing of two successful series of philosophical books. The
more important of these was the Pelican series, mostly on individual
philosophers, but
some on general topics. Not all of them were good, but some were very
good
and very few were bad. The same judgement would be harder to support in
the case of the International Library, published by Routledge, a
resurrection
of an earlier series, initiated by C. K. Ogden, under a similar title.
From
this time forward his enlarged reputation, with its marginally
scandalous
character, made him an effective public defender of various
'progressive'
causes, notably that of removing the legal disabilities of homosexuals.
His renown as a heterosexual amorist ruled out any suspicion of
personal
interest.

Ayer largely gave up philosophical activity -- writing and publication,
even reading and thought -- during the war. He returned to the subject
in 1945 most productively, perhaps invigorated by the pause. The first
fruits of this were two substantial articles on the terminology of
sense-data and on phenomenalism which sought to Clear up ;orne
unfinished business left over
from his earlier work on perception. Fresher and more interesting was
his
London inaugural lecture of 1947, 'Thinking and Meaning'. This is a
bold piece of work and, for the most part, a new departure. It would
seem that he had aeriuus doubts about it afterwards, for he never
arranged for, or
perhaps even allowed, its republication. It does skate over some thin
ice.
It bears a vcry strong impress of the thinking at this time of his old
tutor,
Ryle: but that he was happy to admit, first of all by dedicating the
lecture
to him. It was to receive the privilege, unusual for an inaugural
lecture,
of article-length discussions soon after its publication by H. H. Price
and
J. D. Mabbott.

His procedure is to set up a theory of thinking with five constituents
which are then subjected to a process of radical reduction or whittling
down. There is, on this theory, the person who thinks; the instrument
with
which he thinks (his mind); the process of exercising this mind in
thought,
in various modes such as believing, wondering, doubting. and so on,
this
process being conceived as a series of mental acts; the medium in which
the thought is carried on, that is to say words and images; and,
finally,
the object of thought, its meaning.

'In the first place', he writes, in a way which must have made his
hearers sit up, 'I think that we can dispense with the mind'. What this
comes down to is that the mind is no more than a class of mental
events. His substantial point under this head is that thought needs no
instrument, thinking is not done with anything, in the way that one
sees with one's eyes. The fate that befalls the mind here could also
have engulfed the person on Ayer's principles. It would decompose into
the family of actual and possible sense-data making up a particular
human body and the collection of mental events closely associated with
that body.

After this throat-clearing the main event begins. Thinking in its
various modes is not a process composed of introspectively identifiable
mental acts. It is not an accompaniment of the use of symbols, but it
is that use itself, in so far as it is intelligent or in so far as the
symbols are used meaningfully. To do something intelligently, to think
what one is doing, as we ordinarily put it, is not to do and to think
as well, it is to do something with certain dispositions--for example,
to correct, amend or adjust what one is doing, rather than plunging
mechanically onwards. That was a position to be developed very fully in
Ryle's Concept of Mind. That approach, as Ryle saw, works well
with knowledge, belief, doubt, and their like, but, as he also saw,
applies less adequately to what he called 'pondering', working things
out in one's head. Since Ayer had no objection to privacy, that was not
a problem for him.

What did concern him was to discern what the meaningfulness of our use
of symbols amounts to. His main negative point here is that
meaningfulness
is not explained by the idea of abstract 'objects of thought': concepts
or universals in the case of terms, propositions in the case of
sentences.
These expressions are dummies, unexplanatory synonyms for what they are
alleged to explain. To say what a symbol means is 'to give it an
interpretation
in terms of other symbols', but that will not quite do. In the end the
symbols,
if descriptive, have to be related to 'actual situations'. Objects of
thought,
in the sense of a subsistent realm of Platonic meanings, have been
avoided,
but contact with the actual, non-symbolic world has been preserved.

Ayer was clearly not satisfied, for very long at least, by the doctrine
of 'Thinking and Meaning'. He came back to the topic in 1958 in an
essay on
meaning and intentionality, which came to no very definite conclusion.
The
dissatisfaction may explain why the inaugural was never reprinted in
any
anthology or any of his essay collections.

The main fruit of Ayer's thirteen years at UCL were the essays in Philosophical
Essays (1954), most of those in The Concept of a Person
(1963), and The Problem of Knowledge (1956). Five of the twelve
items in Philosophical Essays cover familiar epistemological
ground in a familiar way, dotting is and crossing ts. He defends his
view that sense-data must appear what they are and be what they appear,
and the connected theory that basic propositions, those which report
sensedata, are incorrigible. Various difficulties in phenomenalism are
confronted, far from successfully as regards the exclusion of reference
to material things in the antecedents of the phenomenalist's
hypotheticals ('if 1 were in the next room...'). The partial
reinstatement of the argument from analogy as an account of our
knowledge of other minds is worked out more fully. In another essay the
same underlying idea -- that past events and the experiences of others
are not logically unobservable since
it is only a contingent fact that they are past or somebody else's --
is
used to give a reasonable interpretation of statements about the past.

There is a conciliatory essay on the analysis of moral judgements, in
which their ultimately non-cognitive nature is still firmly maintained
and there is a characteristically lucid and clear-headed exposition of
the principle of utility and its implications. It is not of merely
expository interest. Ayer's own ultimate moral commitment was to the
principle of greatest happiness and, to a rather admirable extent, his
conduct conformed to it. He was largely devoid of those impulses of
envy, spite, or malice which impel human beings to make others
miserable. A final essay in this ethical group takes up the question of
freedom of the will. In the spirit of Hume he says that an act is free
not if it is uncaused, but if it has the wrong sort of cause. He
then lists a few types of cause generally held to be exculpating and
leaves
it at that, without trying to find any common feature in these causes
which
might explain why they are taken to exculpate (such as that agents
acting
under their pressure would not alter their conduct if faced by the
threat
of blame or punishment).

The most original part of this early post-war work is Ayer's first
incursion into philosophical logic, in essays on individuals, the
identity of indiscernibles, negation, and Quine's ontology. A leading
theme in most of these is that
all the descriptive or semantic work of language is carried out by
predicates. Following Quine's generalised version of Russell's theory
of descriptions, Ayer holds that everything we want to say could be
said in a purely predicative language, although it would be intolerably
inconvenient. Lumping all predicates together it does not occur to him
that spat io-temporal predicates, unlike others, make essential
reference to individuals. The essay on negation is neat and original.
Why, apart from accidental linguistic form, is 'blue' positive and
'not-blue' negative? Could we not have called the latter 'eulb' and the
former 'not-eulb'? Objections are briskly disposed of and a suggestion
in terms of a formally defined characteristic called 'specificity' is
proposed. 'Eulb' is not unlike Goodman's 'grue': invulnerable to formal
attempts to prove its improper or secondary nature.

The Concept of a Person and Other Essays (1963) contains
the best version of Ayer's doctrine about the sufficiency of
predicates: an essay on names and descriptions. Another, on truth,
defends the correspondence theory,
shorn of the representational or pictorial embellishment with which
Russell,
partly, and Wittgenstein, wholly, adorned it, against coherence and
pragmatist
accounts, and against the accusation of triviality. The possibility of
a
private language is combatively defended against Wittgenstein's
prohibition and, in his British Academy lecture of 1959, Ayer surveys
the topic of privacy in general, usefully distinguishing four
varieties. The long title essay criticises
Sir Peter Strawson's view that the concept of a person is primitive and
argues
persuasively that an incoherence Strawson claims to detect in the
theory
that experiences are to be identified by the body to which they are
causally
related can be overcome. Two 'notes on probability' anticipate more
far-reaching
discussions in Probability Probability and Evidence (1972).
'What is a law of nature?' distinguishes law-like from merely
accidental
generalisations in terms of the different attitudes those affirming
general
statements have to them. Roughly, and as a first approximation, I treat
'all
A are B' as a law if there is no property such that the knowledge that
some
A thing had it would weaken my belief that that thing was B. He does
not
ask the question as to when it is reasonable to treat general
statements in
this way. The book ends with a lively essay on fatalism, determinism,
and
the predictability of human action, and begins with a programmatic
inaugural for the Wykeham chair at Oxford on philosophy and language.
'A study of language', he now maintains, 'is inseparable from a study
of the facts which it is used to describe'. The sharp division between
the conceptual and the empirical has become a bit blurred.

The most substantial product of Ayer's years in London was The
Problem of Knowledge (1956). Brilliantly concise even by his
standards -- it is
about 80,000 words long -- it is a better account of Ayer's general
position than the more comprehensive Central Questions of'
Philosophy (1973), since it confines itself to the epistemological
issues in which he was most interested and in which he felt most
comfortable.

An initial chapter sets out various more or less methodological
preliminaries and concludes with a definition of knowledge: I know that
p if, and not
unless, p is true, I am sure that p and I have a right to be sure of
it.
This is more a schema than a definition. What confers the right to
which
he alludes? It seems exposed to Gettier-style objections. And what, one
may
unkindly ask, is the status of cognitive or epistemic rights from the
point
of view of emotivism?

This is followed by a chapter discussing scepticism and certainty.
Philosophical scepticism is distinguished from the ordinary kind as
questioning not the evidence we actually have but the standards by
which evidence of that kind, however abundant, could support or
establish the conclusions drawn from
it. He says that 'it is held' that unless some things are certain,
nothing
can be even probable, and he seems to hold that view himself since he
assumes it, without examination, in what follows. He goes on to argue
that cogito and sum, or, rather, 'I think' and 'I exist,' are
'degenerate' propositions, in which the verb is a sleeping partner; the
conditions for the use of referring expressions involved guarantee the
truth of the statement containing them. He considers the
incorrigibility of reports of one's own current experience. He now
reverts to his original position 'that there is no class of descriptive
statements which are incorrigible' on the ground that one can
misdescribe one's experience and not all such misdescription is merely
verbal.

The most interesting part of the second chapter is Ayer's account of
what he calls the 'pattern of sceptical arguments'. All forms of
philosophical scepticism point to a logical gap between the available
evidence for a certain kind of belief and those beliefs themselves. No
array of singular statements entails a truly general statement; no
collection of experiences entails
the existence of a physical object; from no constellation of behaviour
and
utterance can it be validly inferred that someone else is having an
experience;
from no assemblage of memories and traces does the truth of any
statement
about the past follow. In each of these cases (and others can be added)
all the evidence for beliefs of one kind is supplied by beliefs of
another
kind, but never conclusively, there is always a logical gap. He
distinguishes
four ways of dealing with problems of this kind. (There is, of course,
a
fifth possibility, that of scepticism, but that is not exactly a way of
dealing
with the problem.)

The first way out is intuitionism, which denies that evidence of the
second sort is all we have to go on and claims that we have direct
access to the allegedly inaccessible items: direct realism about
perception, telepathic awareness of the contents of other minds,
retrospective perception of past occurrences. Secondly, there is
reductionism, which, denying the supposed gap, takes statements about
the problematic entities to be translatable
into statements about the uncontroversiallv accessible ones: the tactic
of phenomenalism, 'logical' behaviourisrn. and the C. I. Lewis theory
about
knowledge of the past which Ayer had briefly espoused in his first
book.
Thirdly, there is the 'scientific approach', which attempts to bridge
the
gap by inductive reasoning. the point of view of causal and
representative
theories of perception, of those who take present memories and traces
to
make the existence of past events 'overwhelmingly probable' and those
who
take the argument by analogy to other minds to be acceptable. Finally,
there
is the 'method of descriptive analysis' which accepts the gap, neither
tries
to pull it shut from one end or the other, nor to bridge it, but, as he
puts
it. 'takes it in its stride'. This might seem irresponsibly blithe, a
recognition
of the correctness of scepticism together with a refusal to be affected
by
it. It might more charitably be viewed as an anticipation of the theory
of
'criteria', that is to say, necessarily good evidence that falls short
of
entailment.

In the three remaining chapters, Ayer treats perception, memory, and
'myself and others'. In the first some familiar ground is elegantly
covered, with the epistemic primacy of sense-data asserted as usual.
But phenomenalism
is now fully abandoned for the position that limiting cases of objects
seeming to be perceived in all circumstances would entail the existence
of the object in question. Such an ideal body of evidence is never in
fact achieved, but the bodies of evidence approximating to it that we
do have draw their evidential strength from it. He restates this
conclusion in a form which was to satisfy him until the end of his
career: 'in referring as we do to physical objects we are elaborating a
theory with respect to the evidence of our senses'.

The excellent chapter on rnemory dispels a lot of Russellian confusion
about images and feelings of familiarity and pastness. Memory images
occur,
but they are dispensable. Habit-memory is simply having learnt
something
and not forgotten it. To remember that something was the case is to
have
a true (perhaps also justified) belief about the past. Event-memory is
more
of a problem. It is more than a true belief about one's own past but it
is
not quite clear what. Ayer does not consider the possibility of the
extra
factor being the causation of the belief by a past experience of one's
own.
The logical possibility of perceiving past events is handled as before.
There
is a good discussion of Dummett's question about whether effects might
not
precede their causes.

The final chapter on myself and others also covers some old ground in a
familiar way (e.g. it is only a contingent fact that another's
experience was his and not mine), but there is some interesting new
material about personal identity.

In 1959, H. H. Price, Ayer's mentor and always courteous critic,
retired from the Wykeham chair of logic in Oxford. His election led to
something
of an academic commotion. The three local senior philosophers on the
electoral board voted against him. Ryle and J. D. Mabbott supported W.
C. Kneale,
the distinguished historian of logic, Ryle arguing, truly but perhaps
not
altogether relevantly, that 'Kneale had borne the heat and burden of
the
day'. Austin was for Sir Peter Strawson. Ayer was voted in by the
vice-chancellor
(Sir Maurice Bowra), Professor John Wisdom of Cambridge, and the two
New
College representatives. Ryle was very displeased and resigned from all
the electoral boards on which he sat in protest. The fuss soon died
down
and his opponents did not seem to hold Ayer's victory against him.
Price,
when told the news, was delighted.

For the next nineteen years, until his retirement in 1979, Ayer
occupied his chair and the fellowship at New College that went with it
with considerable success. His lectures, delivered at high speed and
argumentatively dense, were too demanding for the less committed of his
undergraduate audiences, which tended to fall away sharply as the term
went on. But he was of great value to Oxford's large population of
graduate students in philosophy, most of them reading for the new, two
year degree of B.Phil. He energetically
reanimated the professorial tradition in Oxford of the 'informal
instruction',
a weekly two-hour class, open to all graduates and to recommended
undergraduates.
He would select some recently published monograph or essay-collection,
talk
about it himself and then cajole members of the class to prepare papers
on
parts of the book for the remaining weeks. There were also his 'Tuesday
evenings', when a group of younger philosophy tutors would meet in his
rooms to hear and mangle a paper by one of them. At six o'clock strong
drink would be
served and under its enlivening influence the discussion would become
at
once more festive and more vehement. He was an admirable and very
hard-working
supervisor of graduate students, taking a great deal of trouble about
their
theses and their professional futures.

There was a non-metropolitan, donnishly respectable side to Ayer's
character which flourished in New College. He had a fine set of rooms,
looking over the college garden. He married Alberta Chapman (Dee Wells)
in 1960 and lived with her in London, but he spent most weekdays in
term in Oxford and so
was to all intents and purposes a resident. He dined regularly and
brought
in guests for common-room nights. For many years he turned out for the
fellows' team in their annual cricket match with a team of the college
choir school. On his first appearance he scored 74 not out, more than
the rest of his
team put together. His batting was very much in character: quick, bold,
and militant.

In the two decades since The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge
had seemed the last word in philosophy, the centre of the discipline
had
unquestionably moved back to Oxford, which, despite a philosophical
population
of unparalleled size, had been pretty much in eclipse since the early
years
of the century. Ryle and Austin had, in different but still cognate
ways,
developed a philosophical procedure remote from Ayer's deductive
reasoning
about propositions of high generality in which it was assumed that
formal
logic revealed the essential structure of thought and language,
something
inherited by Ayer from Russell. The linguistic philosophers of Oxford
examined
ordinary language and common (or common-sense) beliefs, rather than a
logically
regimented language and scientific knowledge. At the time of Ayer's
arrival
this was the consensus with which he was confronted, and it was
expected
that there would be an illuminating battle of Titans between him and
Austin.
Because of Austin's lamentably early death in 1960 this never happened.
Other
factors combined with Ayer's efforts to move the prevailing
philosophical
attitude into something more Russellian and formalistic: Quine's
exhilarating
year as Eastman professor in 1953-4, Strawson's move towards system in
Individuals
in 1959, perhaps some influence, to the advantage of scientism, from
the
'Australian materialism' of Smart and Armstrong. In his years as
professor
in Oxford he could feel that the tide was turning his way and that he
had
helped to turn it.

He had little sympathy for the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein,
although he never concealed his large debt to the Tractatus. Already
in 1954, as has been mentioned, he had rejected the private language
argument. Soon after coming back to Oxford he published a gleefully
destructive attack on Malcolm's strange theory that dreams are not
experiences but that to have dreamed is to be disposed to tell stories
when one wakes up. Malcolm responded with some heat. Ayer's campaign
culminated in his lively but slightly superficial book on Wittgenstein
in 1985.

From the time of his return to Oxford, when he was nearing fifty, Ayer
continued to be very productive, publishing thirteen books between The
Concept of a Person in 1963 and Thomas Paine in 1988, the
year
before his death. There were three essay collections; two substantial
surveys
of important, more or less empiricist philosophers of the modern age (
The Origins of Prayrnatisrn, about Peirce and James, in 1968, and
Russell and Moore: The Analytical Heritage in 1971); short books on
Hume
in 1980, Russell in 1972, and Wittgenstein in 1985; an idiosyncratic
and
rather disjointed history of Philosophy in the Twentieth Century
in
1981, largely recycling material published earlier; slim volumes on
Voltaire
and Thomas Paine towards the end of his life; and two more ambitious
works: Probability and Evidence in 1972 and The Central
Questions
of Philosophy, a statement of his ideas about practically
everything,
in 1973.

These books were, as always, very well written. No words were wasted;
complex bodies of thought were lucidly expounded. But there were no
major changes of view and no ventures into unfamiliar territory. The
book on probability consists of John Dewey Lectures, delivered at
Columbia University, supplemented 'in order to bring this book up to a
respectable size', as he cheerfully
admits, by a pretty lethal criticism of R. F. Harrod's attempt to solve
the
problem of induction and a concluding essay on conditionals. The Dewey
Lectures
start with a penetrating attempt to reinforce Hume's argument that no
factual
inference is demonstrative by way of the notion of an 'intrinsic
description',
under which every event is indeed logically distinct from every other
event.
Kneale's doctrine of natural necessity is dogmatically dismissed. Ayer
distinguishes three kinds of probability (from Hume to Carnap, most
philosophers get by with two): purely mathematical, as in the calculus
of chances; statistical, based on frequencies; and epistemic, issuing
in judgements about the credibility of particular beliefs. He repeats
his earlier contentions that frequencies allow no judgements about
particular events and that logical relation theories like Carnap's rely
on an unclear and perhaps unclarifiable notion of 'total evidence'.
Ayer's account of probability was convincingly criticised for
its lack of familiarity with recent work in the field.

The two historical surveys are interestingly different. In the one on
Peirce and James the two subjects are examined from a certain distance.
Only a
selection of their work is investigated, that part of it which mostly
closely
overlaps Ayer's own interests. In Peirce's case this means that rather
a
lot is left out. Fallibilism is mentioned, but only in passing; there
is
nothing at all about Peirce's critical commonsensisrn. Ayer considers
Peirce's
version of the pragmatic theory of meaning, his philosophy of science,
where
he rejects Peirce's vindication of induction, but expresses sympathy
for
his belief in objective chance, and his theory of signs, which receives
the
largest share of his attention. James's pragmatic theory of truth is
objected
to on fairly familiar lines. Ayer's main concern is with James's
radical
empiricism, which he sees as a rough, preliminary adumbration of his
own
account of empirical knowledge as composed of a primary system of
sensible
elements and a secondary system of theoretical constructions out of
these
elements (minds, common objects, the theoretical entities of physics).
He
seeks to replace James's large and sweeping constructional gestures
with
more detailed and explicit constructions of his own. He concludes by
arguing
that the constructedness of an entity does not, as James supposed (and
in
this Russell was to follow him), show that it is of an inferior
ontological
status to that of the elements from which it is constructed.

His treatment of Russell and Moore is much less distorted by his own
preoccupations and supplies a much more comprehensive and balanced
account of the subjects. That is obviously because he was much closer
to them; their thought was
part of the original constitution of his mind as a philosopher and most
of his work took the form of developing or reacting against ideas he
had
found in them. The book is more clear-cut and decisive than that on the
two American pragmatists. He begins with Russell's conception of
philosophy
as the analysis of most of what we think there is as logical
constructions
out of sensory data, a procedure authoritatively illustrated by
Russell's
theory of descriptions. The doctrines of logical atomism and neutral
monism,
in Russell's distinctive interpretation of them, are set out with the
fluent
concision that is derived from long familiarity. The view which Russell
shared with James that logical constructions are not part of the
ultimate
furniture of the world is once again dismissed. In the case of Moore
the
early criticisms of the principle that esse is percipi and the doctrine
of internal relations are largely endorsed: his defence of common sense
is not. There is a very thorough examination of Moore's resolutely
nai've
but nevertheless scrupulously careful dealings with abstract entities
such
as concepts, universals, propositions, and facts, and of his ideas
about
the nature and seemingly paradoxical uspm, on philosophical analysis.

Much of the material of these two books reappears in The Central
Questions of'Philosophy which was published not long after them. It
is a little odd to find the militantly atheistic Ayer being invited to
deliver lectures endowed for the purpose of defending natural religion
which had, in practice, recently been the occasion, for the most part,
for the presentation of large metaphysical systems such as Alexander's Space,
Time and Deitv and Whitehead's Process and Reality. Ayer
complied in a negative way with both the principle and the practice of
the series. His last chapter is devoted to undermining arguments for
religious belief and his first to rejecting the
claims of metaphysics, although more politely and less sweepingly than
in
his first youthful onslaught. On the whole, the book adds up to an
admirable summary or textbook ol Ayer's own mature philosophy, and, to
some extent, of the kind of Russellian analytic philosophy of which he
was such an able exponent. This modesty of aim and achievement may
explain why it does not seem to have been reviewed in most of the main
philosophical periodicals. A great deal of ground is covered in a very
short space: most adroitly, perhaps, in the chapter on logic and
existence, in which thc main ingredients of logic, as well as set
theory, are discussed, and also existence, identity, analyticity, and
abstract entities. The once most ardent champion of the
analytic-synthetic distinction puts up littlc resistance to Quine's
dismissal of it. Having previously
believed, no doubt under the influence of Russell, that common sense
and
phyics give incompatible accounts of material things, he suggests hcre
that
a loose compromise is possible and that unobservable particles are
literally
parts of ordinary material objects. Although largely derivative from
Ayer's
other writings, there can be no book which covers so much of what
really
is, (or, at any rate, then was) central to philosophy than this. It is
the
most comprehensive, although not most exciting, introduction to Ayer's
philosophy;
it is a pretty good introduction to philosophy in general.

His Philosophy in the Twentieth Century was an attempt, he
says, to provide a sequel to Russell's History of Western Philosophy,
bringing the story up to date. It shares some of the qualities of its
predecessor, being brisk and lucid as well as being selective -- even
more than Russell. Bergson, Alexander, and Whitehead, for example. are
considered simply as they
figure in Collingwood's Idea of Nature, an intriguing but
unreliable peep-hole. Price appears only as sharing Broad's interest in
psychical research. The only non-analytic philosophers treated at
length are James, a handful of phenomenologists and existentialists,
and Collingwood, who is considered at some length. Ayer dutifully sets
out some of Collingwood's extravagances, such as that works of art are
in the artists' minds, not on gallery walls, and that history is the
re-enactment of past thoughts, with an uncomprehending bemusement
worthy of Prichard or Moore. Added to brief versions of Ayer's earlier
treatment of Russell, James, and Moore is a substantial account
of C. I. Lewis, recalling discussions of him in the late 1930s with
Austin
and others. A singular assemblage of philosophers of mind, from Broad
to
Davidson, is handled in one chapter. A final one brings the story
pretty
much up to date with Chomsky, Dummett, Kripke, and Putnam. The book is
not
as amusing as Russell's and is not encumbered with extraneous
historical
matter, indeed, it is minimally historical about the people and ideas
it
does cover. Under a kind of Geneva convention he discloses only the
name,
date, and professional positions of his selected subjects.

Two of the best essays -- on Austin's attack on sense-data and
Malcolm's theory of dreams -- in the collection Metaphysics and
Common Sense -- have already been mentioned, as has, by
implication, a third 'On What There Must Be'. The best thing in Freedom
and Morality is an article 'Identity and Reference' in which Kripke's
influential theory of reference is taken to task. The only one of the
three short books which requires a mention is that on Wittgenstein.
Apart from Ayer's usual merits of clarity, concision, and what might be
called transparency of argument -- something particularly important in
this case -- it has the virtue of being wholly unintimidated.
Wittgenstein is treated pretty much as if he were Bosanquet, the
producer of strange utterances in dire need of interpretation.

Activities outside Oxford were by no means suspended during Ayer's
years as Wykeham professor. He was a member of the Plowden Committee on
Primary Education and, for all his carefully nurtured radicalism,
dissented from
its hostility to formal methods of instruction. It was primarily for
his
services in this connection, and not for what he had done for
philosophy,
that he was knighted in 1970. He was president of numerous progressive
organisations, for the most part concerned with 'humanism' and
homosexual law reform. For many years a member of the Institut
Internationale de Philosophie, he was its president from 1968 to 1971.
This supplied lavish opportunities for
attending conferences in more or less exotic places, a pursuit to which
he was strongly attached. At one of these, at Varna, a Black Sea resort
in Bulgaria, in face of the total failure of repeated pressure on the
button
to obtain any room service, he voiced his dissatisfaction in a loud
voice.
The room's bugging systetn soon brought up an apologetic secret
policeman
in managerial guise.

In 1969 he was sounded by some fellows of Wadham about becoming warden
and enjoyed thinking about the idea, both until he decided not to stand
and, a little wistfully, afterwards. In 1977 he published Part of
My Life , the first and better of two autobiographical volumes,
taking the story up to his arrival at UCL. The second volume, More
of Mv Life, which appeared in 1983, covered a shorter and less
interesting period, finishing in 1963. He retired from his Oxford chair
in 1978, on reaching the statutory age, but his election to a
fellowship at Wolfson College gave him a toe-hold in the university for
a number of years, which he made use of by regularly attending the
Tuesday evening discussions. In 1979 he was elected to an honorary
studentship at Christ Church, which was somewhat undermined by an
unfortunate speech at some college occasion.

In 1981 Ayer and his second wife. Dee, were divorced and he married
Vanessa Lawson. He and Dee had had one son. Nicholas, to whom he was
devoted. He
was extremely happy with Vanessa and she fell in splendidly with his
characteristic style of London entertaining. He seems always to have
lived in narrow houses where party guests flowed out of available rooms
and on to the stairs. This time of very great domestic happiness did
not last long since Vanessa died in 1985. With her he made an extended
visit to Dartmouth College in New
Hampshire in 1982. In 1987, without her, he made a similar visit to
Bard
College on the Hudson River.

Ayer was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1952 and was an
active one. His 'Privacy' was the annual philosophical lecture for 1959
and 'Bertrand Russell as a Philosopher' the Master-Mind Lecture for
1972. He was awarded honorary degrees by Brussels (1962), East Anglia
(1972), London (1978),
Trent, Ontario (1980), Bard College (1985). and Durham (1988). There
was
a distinguished symposium on his work. Perception and Identity, edited
by
Graham Macdonald, to whose contents he replied with freshness and
vigour
in 1979. He also managed substantial replies to most of the
contributions
to the less distinguished volume dedicated to him in the Library of
Living
Philosophers, edited by Lewis E. Hahn, which was not published
until
1992, three years after his death. The only serious monograph about his
philosophy is that of John Foster, a most loyal, but penetratingly
critical,
admirer, which came out in 1985, in good time for him to enjoy it.

Ayer's health was generally good -- perhaps surprisingly so for such a
heavy smoker; steady, but not problematic, drinker; and, after his
annual
cricket matches in middle age, resolute avoider of exercise, apart from
a little night-club-style dancing. But in the last few years of his
life
his health declined and he died on 27 June 1989. A curious medical
incident
occurred during his final illness. At one point he was thought to have
died,
but, to the surprise of those attending him, he then revived. His
accounts
of what went through his mind during the conscious part of this process
left
the question of the afterlife still very much open. He was looked after
in
his last days by his second wife, Dee, whom he had remarried shortly
before
his death.

Ayer's general intellectual enthusiasms were, like his philosophy, on
the narrow side, but intense. He was extremely well read in the great
male Victorian novelists: Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Wilkie Collins.
He liked painting, but not very ardently. His comments on visits as a
young man to the great collections of Europe are dutiful and rather
banal, calling to mind A. C. Benson's remarks on Dickens in Max
Beerbohm's A Christian Garland
: 'He had for that writer a very sincere admiration, though he was
inclined to think that his true excellence lay not so much in faithful
portrayal of the life of his times, or in gift of sustained narration,
or in those scenes of pathos which have moved so many hearts in so many
quiet homes, as in the power of inventing highly fantastic figures,
such as Mr Micawber or Mr Pickwick'. He loved the cinema and had at one
time written film reviews. Music was
for dancing to.

He was a faithful supporter of Tottenham Hotspur and, in something of
the same spirit, of the Labour Party. He was the friend of many
prominent Labour politicians and regularly spoke out in their and their
party's interest.
There was a kind of boyish mischievousness about his politics as about
the
vehemence of his attacks on religion which preserved them from any
taint
of rancour so that they were no obstacle to close and long-lasting
friendships
with Conservatives and Christians. Like Bloomsbury he thought personal
relations much too important to be sacrificed to the abstractions of
ideology.

He was undoubtedly one of the liveliest figures on the British
philosophical scene in his time and, when he appeared on it, it was in
need of enlivening. He was not a highly original thinker. His impact
was due to the brilliance with which he arranged and expressed the
ideas he had acquired from others. Perhaps his greatest intellectual
virtue was his unremitting adherence to clarity and to rational
arpment. His work is without allusions, undeveloped suggestions,
obscuritv, and mannerism. Through his books and his teaching he set a
fine example of intellectual discipline.

---------------------------

Bibliographical note: There are substantial bibliographies of Ayer's
writings in two collections of essays devoted to his work. Much the
better of the
two is in Thc Philosophy of A. J. Ayer, ed. Lewis E. Hahn,
(Illinois: Open Court, 1992). That in Perception and ldentity,
ed. Graham Macdonald, (Macmillan, 1979) (a better collection of essays)
is very sketchy.

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